There was an error downloading ‘http://localhost/…./Service.asmx’. The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable.

I was receiving this error when I was trying to add web reference to the webservice which was deployed in our server from inside our Visual Studio.

But putting the same url in the IE, everything seemed to work fine. So there was no issue of IIS not running.

Later I realized that the issue was because of the a software that I was using Ultrasurf (UltraSurf is the flagship software product from UltraReach Internet Corp. for Internet anti-censorship. It enables users inside countries with heavy Internet censorship to visit any public web sites in the world safely and freely.)

But even after closing the UltraSurf the problem persisted. I restarted the system, cleared my system using CCleaner but wasn’t able to solve the problem.

Excellent article. I am too new to webservice and have been given a project that has webservices. This was the very first error i encountered which i was able to resolve after this article. Just check the “Automatic detect setting”.